Anatomy of Font Response

This chapter was especially important and helpful to me, because of my limited knowledge about typographic terminology.  I have seen the movie Helvetica in one of my design classes last year, but aside from that my knowledge about type in scarce. Some of the terms I found interesting were: x-height, which was middle of the letter,  ear, which is an extended stoke of the letter, and tail which is the swash.  X-height makes the appearance of the font different from being taller or shorter; it gives a completely different appearance of styles, and changes the ascender and descender height. Esthetically, this completely changes the look and feel of the font.  The ear and tail give the font flourish which I like.  I found the evolution of the letterform interesting;  from slanted to more vertical, going from written script to more type style.  I finally understand the differences serifs, which originated from written fonts, and san serif, which became the font style which of printed fonts.  I also discovered that tend to appreciate the Traditional period of typography, which was in 1700s. One of my favorite is Georgia, which is used by the New York Times website.  Georgia has a large x-height which makes it very readable, even at smaller sizes.  The conversion between points and picas and inches was helpful in the chapter also.  I know 72 points in an inch is important, and why it is so widespread in America.  The authors presented another concept which was significant and I never thought before,  that was the contrast between wide and narrow stokes in Modern typography.  The breakdown of type made it easier to dissect the differences between types and also understand how the design of the type can affect how it appears to us.  In web design, we borrow the word, em,  from typography used in CSS code,  which I found fitting too.